A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to publishing hypermedia documents over wide area networks such as the World Wide Web. More particularly, this invention relates to the application of the price discrimination technique in the area of economics to the publishing of hypermedia documents containing advertising materials.
B. Description of the Related Art
Wide area networks (WANs), notably the Internet, are assuming the role of xe2x80x9cinformation superhighwaysxe2x80x9d and are distributing electronic embodiments of mail, textbooks, magazines, advertisements, and even audio and video clips around the world. Herein the term xe2x80x9cdocumentxe2x80x9d generically denotes and includes any and all such electronic content.
FIG. 1 conceptually illustrates the basic architecture of a xe2x80x9cclient-serverxe2x80x9d WAN, like the Internet. Servers 10a-n form the backbone of the WAN. The servers are interconnected by a telecommunications infrastructure and exchange information in the form of one or more recognized protocols, such as protocol 30. For example, in the case of the Internet, network protocols include the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), for file transfer, and Telnet, for remote log-in. Each server effectively represents and services its one or more xe2x80x9cclientsxe2x80x9d. Basically, the clients are the ultimate sources and targets of underlying information, while the servers dispatch and receive messages across the WAN in compliance with network protocols. Each client may correspond to a single user""s computer, or may itself be hierarchically complex and may comprise a further sub-network or collection of numerous computers, such as the well-known, proprietary sub-networks of America Online, Compuserve, and Prodigy. In this way, information of any kind can be distributed worldwide in electronic form at high speeds.
One of the most rapidly expanding aspects of the Internet is the World Wide Web (the Web). The Web is comprised of those Internet servers (and their clients) able to support the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol, better known as the xe2x80x9chttpxe2x80x9d. The Web allows documents and graphical materials to be interlinked by means of xe2x80x9chypertextxe2x80x9d (or more generally, hypermedia) document elements. When a user utilizes a cursor control device to select and xe2x80x9cclickxe2x80x9d on a hypermedia item in one document, a related document will automatically be accessed as identified by that link. For example, FIG. 2 illustrates a simple example of a popular Web document known as a xe2x80x9chome pagexe2x80x9d. The home page is the main page of a Web site. A Web site is comprised of several Web pages. For example, the Web pages 602, 604, 606, and 608 in FIGS. 6a-d are the pages that form the Web site. The main page 602 is the home page of the Web site. In FIG. 2, another example of a home page 40 includes title 42, graphic image 44, instructional text 48, and list of bullet items 46a-c. Selections 46a-c are each hypertext. A Web hypermedia item is actually encoded with a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) tag, which literally addresses a document located on a remote network server. If a client of a Web server is equipped with suitable xe2x80x9cbrowserxe2x80x9d software, then a user of that client can point and click on any one of the hypermedia items within home page 40, and an http request to view the associated, linked content residing elsewhere on the Internet will automatically be generated and dispatched by the client""s server to the appropriate Internet server which xe2x80x9chostsxe2x80x9d the linked document. The linked material will then automatically be retrieved and ultimately displayed on the client. Http further includes the Hyper-text markup language (html), which may be used to specify a certain layout structure for Web documents, e.g., specifying subsections of the document as a title, image, list, etc. Html specifications are interpreted by a client""s browser, resulting in an appropriate display on the particular client""s computer platform.
FIG. 3 provides a broad outline of a prior art client-server architecture, for use in the context of a WAN such as that illustrated in FIG. 1. User""s client machine 20d preferably includes digital computer facilities including CPU 68, user I/O peripherals 66, and storage device 64 (including internal and external memory) for storing operating system 62 and client software 60. WAN server 10d, preferably coupled to client 20d through a high-speed local connection, is equipped with digital computer facilities analogous to those of client 20d, and also with server software 50. The server 10d constitutes what is known in the art as a service provider.
A user can access a search engine""s web site by using the browser software. A search engine is a service that compiles a list of target documents (Web pages, but not necessarily a home page), in the form of hypertext links, that correspond to an user query. These search engines have recently turned into portals. A portal is an Internet Web site that not only offers the user the capability to perform a search, but that attempts to satisfy all of the needs of the user by integrating other services into their site. FIG. 4a shows an example of a portal site displaying the search results for a query of xe2x80x9ccheap airfarexe2x80x9d. Portals are in fact second generation services, and are essentially a refinement of Web search engine services.
One of the most important aspects of the explosive growth of the Web is the potential for electronic commerce that the Web offers. The novelty of the medium and the ease of access not only lead to interesting market structures, but to different ways of searching for services and interacting with consumers. Over the past four to five years we have seen the appearance of several important Web services for electronic commerce, of which a relatively new instance is the portal site. Examples of portal sites are Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos. Portals attempt to act as a starting point for the users on the Web, exposing the users to advertisement information from sponsors of the portal site. This leads users of the portal to electronic commerce activities, such as travel and consumer electronics.
The business model of portal services consists of two parts. The first one is to have the consumer buy goods directly from the portal or through a partner site. The other strategy involves satisfying the user""s information needs locally and in the process present advertising banners that result in revenues to the portal. The mechanics of this approach are relatively simple. Users enter a portal site, search for information, see advertisement information, and then usually leave.
While this model seems to have worked for various companies, it is highly paradoxical in the sense that it confronts the portal with a dilemma. On the one hand, the service strives to generate better and faster results for the users. If the results are presented at the entry point, however, leading users to another site, there is an opportunity cost for the provider. The user never travels deeply into the site, thus missing the advertising and consumer goods that he or she potentially could buy. To solve this dilemma, some search services (e.g., Lycos) have implemented mechanisms that work to prevent users from leaving for other search services (e.g., Excite). When a user of the first service searches for the name of the second service, the first service displays results that attempt to dissuade the user from leaving the first service site by presenting a link back to the first service""s search page.
A recent solution to the dilemma resorts to the notion of xe2x80x9cstickinessxe2x80x9d, whereby the provider attempts to keep consumers at their site by displaying potentially attractive links that only point into their site. This is much in line with standard marketing practices in the commercial world.
To solve this problem we present an alternative approach to the stickiness solution. In order to solve this dilemma, this approach exploits the fact that, given different needs for information goods (a user requesting information from different categories), users of the Web are willing to spend additional time for acquiring the information goods while surfing the Web, before their need for information is satisfied. The approach is referred hereto as time discrimination, because it is a variant of a technique known in economics as price discrimination. In this invention, instead of blocking surfing paths, the depth to which users surf when accessing an electronic commerce provider is increased.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to meet the foregoing needs by providing systems and methods that provide time discrimination in the World Wide Web.
Specifically, a method for meeting the foregoing needs is disclosed. The method creates a computational model of users of the World Wide Web that represents aggregate World Wide Web surfing patterns; uses the computational model to determine a first number of clicks that a user goes through in a specific type of query entered by the user in a conventional web search engine; uses the computational model to determine a second number of clicks that the user goes through in the specific type of query entered by the user in an optimized web search engine; and subtracts the first number of clicks from the second number of clicks to extract the gain obtained by time discrimination. Further, two mechanisms that facilitate the exploitation of the gain obtained by time discrimination are disclosed. These mechanisms respectively involve the techniques, disclosed herewith, of dynamic reconfiguration of Web links, and of versioning information goods.
Both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description provide examples and explanations only. They do not restrict the claimed invention.